


Reached The Open Sea

by applegnat



Category: The Lymond Chronicles
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:40:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applegnat/pseuds/applegnat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You may flinch and rebel all you please; but not against the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reached The Open Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Written for lgbtfest 2009, for the prompt: Any fandom, Any character, How a character reconciles their religion or faith and their sexuality or gender. With thanks to bustedflush for her beta genius, and to 22by7 for her insight and encouragement. All mistakes mine.

_An angel descends with every drop of water and lays it in its appointed place. If it rains, you will be dry or you will be wet. Why then flinch or rebel?_

 

::

**August 1558**

 

Birgu, Malta. The sun shines as it would on a piece of Africa, on the Order of St John toiling in their chains of obedience, poverty and chastity. Their citadels, their cathedrals and their forts blossom, flaking and delicate upon the barren rock. The bulwark of the Faith and the flail of the infidel makes its haven on this land, and grows smaller, and offers less and less every day, to those who find their way to it.

At thirty, widowed of his Saracen wife, unshaven, unrepentant and all too inclined to giving his soul into the keeping of human hands, Jerott Blyth returns. He walks straight past the grand cathedral and enters the home of the Order to meet Parisot de la Valette.

::

That he is wanted here is apparent. De Valette is not overburdened with time or benevolence, but when Jerott appears at the doors of the Order in Malta, years after his repudiation of the vows of the Knight Hospitallers, de Valette grants an audience with immediate effect.

Jerott is no longer an impetuous adolescent, storming into the cloister with his faith and his prodigious talent for war bolstering him. Standing before de Valette, who knew him when he was a boy and de Valette the naval commander of the Knights, he gets the sense that the older man no longer knows what to make of him. Jerott is a renegade from the faith, a man who has gone from being mercenary and adventurer to householder and merchant to captain of Henri's armies under Francis Crawford, Maréchal de Sevigny. Someone like him should not be susceptible to this unexpected reversion, reeling backwards through fate to arrive into the presence of His Eminent Highness, the Grand Master of the Knights of St John and the scourge of Asia.

But the spell has broken, and Jerott, so long the sheet anchor that has kept one Crawford or the other bound to this life, is in need of his own moorings now. He has always known, he supposes, why Marthe's accusations about his closeness to Francis hurt so much more than the others of her vast array of poisoned darts. That it is love he has never looked to deny, except at his angriest. That it is his life's cup of wine, spilled now on the ground, he has learned only since his last morning in Flaw Valleys.

As a teenager he came to Malta to seek shelter for a heart broken by the death of a fiancée he loved; he is returning, this time, with a heart all too full. He has buried his wife of five years in the home she never knew in Scotland, and in the appalling knowledge that as surely as she never loved him, he never loved her. Like a man woken from a trance, Jerott stood over her grave and exonerated her from all the blame he had laid on her over the last five years. The grief, the resentment, the humiliating loneliness of a marriage in which he had expected to find a best friend and was faced instead with an adversarial stranger, are his alone to bear now. He is not surprised to look back on his farewell to Francis at the Somerville gates and realise that in its cursory, professional salutations, Francis was offering Jerott a chance to turn the key and begin a different life.

If Jerott were less tired, he would feel more shame at the thought that Francis, with characteristic delicacy, allowed Jerott to shut the door himself.

But at least he has always been strong, and he has learned in his adulthood to endure without breaking, so he inquires, in the present, after the Grand Master's health, and plunges, as a soldier should, into the latest news from his travels.

Parisot de la Valette's eyes bore into Jerott's with all the casual goodwill of a razor. _Christ in heaven, he's good_, Jerott thinks admiringly. De Valette has always been someone he's looked up to. _The Osmanli snapping at his ankles, campaigns ebbing out of control like fistfuls of sand, Huguenot infiltration and a shrinking treasury to deal with, and he wants me to grovel._ He finishes his narration curtly and usefully, making the best outline he can of the situation in Scotland and France, of news from Italy that he's picked up on ship, and of the other captain, Danny Hislop, who has come along with him.

"What will the Order require of me?" he says, at the end.

De Valette is silent for a moment. "It is usual," he then says, a little gruff, "to ask of new recruits what they feel they will require of the Order."

"I was asked that question once, by Juan de Homedes," Jerott replies. "I told him that I had come to the Order because a woman I loved died, and because of this I felt that I had only a damaged husk, in place of a soul, to offer the faith. And it would not be enough."

If de Valette feels the need to remark on how this appears to be a cycle in Jerott's life, he does not act on it. Surprised at how hurtful the thought is, Jerott goes on.

"I was seventeen then. And the Grand Master told me that the Order was a congregation of those who strove to achieve grace, and not a gathering of those already unstained and perfect of spirit."

"And this hunger has brought you back?" de Valette asks.

"It took me to Scotland, and Turkey, and France also," Jerott says. "Mine is not the faith of the ideologue, sir. I can offer, if it pleases you, nothing more than my sword, and my word of honour."

"So you come to fight," de Valette says. "But not to pray. "

Jerott pauses. "To pray," he replies. "But not to espouse a way of life."

"The Order is no place for mercenaries," de Valette says.

Jerott has nothing to say, except _that is a lie_ and _but that is all I am_. In his own mind, the word describes his profession better than anything ever has.

"But I notice you do not say that you have no faith, nor that you have no honour to pledge us. Juan de Homedes was right," de Valette says. "If you wish to seek redemption once more within the vows of the Order, you are welcome. If you want time, to reflect and rebuild your own bulwarks before you join us, then you may say so, and stay on to aid your brothers in Christ while you do it."

"Thank you," Jerott says. A knot of tension dissolves between his shoulder blades.

He lifts his head and looks around him. They are in the Grand Master's rooms, inside the cathedral. On a clear day you can see all the way to Gozo from the windows. The ships gather in the harbour inside the long chain, white and small and graceful, like birds at a bath. The bulwark of the faith; the bulwark of his faith, once. But no more, Jerott thinks. He recognises politics where he once saw the true religion, and where he once made promises he now makes bargains.

"You left once, for love of a man," de la Valette says, suddenly. Jerott's neck muscles snap to attention again, painfully.

"That man was false. Was Francis Crawford also false?"

Jerott cannot meet the Grand Master's eyes. "No," he says, exerting the blunt instruments of tongue and teeth to obey his will. "He is true. As a leader, as a friend, and as a brother, he is true."

And after that extremely astute and soul-shredding question, Parisot de la Valette gives Jerott a provisional admittance into the fold, and lets him go.

_Once I loved a woman, and wanted to make her my wife, and once I loved a man, and wanted to make him my leader. I shall never do either again. _

Jerott knows that he is no longer capable of making those promises, either. He knows that he will repeat most of the mistakes of the last four years to have Francis by him again – to sleep beside him on the _Dauphiné_, to hold his arms and help him walk again on Volos, to sit at his desk and plan campaigns at Paris and Lyons. To have Francis look at him the way he did once, in the house on Rue Mercier, when he protested to the old Dame. _You cannot debar a human being from love._

No, unfortunately, Jerott thinks, you cannot. Even when love is not a way of life, neither on Malta nor anywhere in Christendom. Even if you cannot be loved in return. Even if you do not know whether this thing that eating you alive with pain is shame or relief. Even if your wife turned to Islam in search of love – in search of a world where she would be less alone– you cannot follow her example.

Because you do not have to, Jerott tells himself. Because your quest for grace _did_ take you around the continents. Because you loved, and in return you learned what it is to be true of heart, and true of faith. You have learned that it is men who sustain and are sustained by nations, not God. Your body has always obeyed you. Now you will make good your losses, and hold on to your mind and soul. You will get a grip on them from where they lie fallen, blades without hilts, and you will use them to repair the hurts in your own world. Because this is the only world you have. And in your world, you may flinch and rebel all you please; but not against the truth.

On the matter of shedding tears in church, a private fastidiousness overtakes his theological understanding of comfort. To some unchallenged deeps of his mind it seems a little obscene to desecrate the tranquillity of the body that offers itself to God in His house. But the sky over Birgu is a brilliant blue, of the sort never seen on the face of the earth, and the sea is the colour of jewels. So Jerott turns away from the altar and walks down to the quay, breathing in the air skeined with sanctity and reverence, trying to revel in it as he once did.

He reaches the end of the promenade, sits down and lets buries his face in his hands.

When he lifts it a little later, he finds Danny Hislop sitting beside him, studying the Mediterranean, chin propped on hands. His small, fresh face looks studiously demure.

Jerott dries his face with a gritty palm and clears his throat.

"So, what winged words spake Zeus on Olympus?" Danny asks lightly. "Do I have the honour of speaking with the once and future Chevalier Blyth?"

"I have learned better than to say 'never again,'" Jerott says, and clears his throat once more. "But no. I don't think so."

Danny turns to look at him. "Might I ask why?" he says.

"They ask too much, Francis once said to me," Jerott says. "I don't think so – but I cannot give everything they ask for, and I cannot pretend otherwise. I can only offer what is mine to possess."

"And they give you nothing in return?" Danny asks. "Since we are speaking only in the metaphor."

"They have nothing I want," Jerott says. "Any longer."

"What _do_ you want?" Danny asks, and then levels his gaze at Jerott, shrewd and a little malicious, and also, perhaps not inexplicably, a little fond. "For God to wipe the tears from all faces?"

"That would be agreeable," says Jerott, when he can find his voice again.

 

::

 

Jerott goes to pray. Not that morning, or the next, or the one after that, but he goes, at some point of time soon after he returns. Then he goes every day after that. It is more difficult on some days than others. It makes Jerott think again and again of his long journey to Constantinople, to fight for love, a victory that no human being has ever won yet.

It isn't always easy. There are days when he walks around the cathedral square, trying to make himself go in. There are days when he works himself to exhaustion, until he can stumble into the nearest dormitory and fall asleep because it mortifies him to have this body, in spite of all he has learned in the last seven years.

There are days when he walks up the street leading to the great cathedral with a flutter in his stomach. He climbs up the stairs, nervous and sharply awake, apprehensive of what has brought him back here after all his years of wandering, even above the company of his fellows, even above his dedication to war. He waits for the cathedral doors to open in the calm of despair, with a dim memory of the candles, of the altar, of drawing the same breath as those around him as he waits to be received into the presence.

As the sinner and the wayward son and the supplicant, Jerott has come here time after time, and humbled himself. After seven years away he finds himself capable only of baring the lines of fortune on his forehead to God and ask, Why? Why is it this thing that binds every cell of my body and every grain of my spirit together?

He remembers Marthe, saying to him, _The way is one, the form is many._ And his own voice, answering, young and fluent and obnoxious: _Well, it sounds like they have some of the right ideas._

This time, he does not flinch.

And one evening, when the doors open, and the candles lift their light into the vaults, and Danny Hislop the cynic and unbeliever walks in ahead of him without a second thought – he comes to hear the singing, he tells Jerott – that Jerott suffers his greatest shock since he beheld Francis alive: he feels an answering twinge of joy.

He stands rooted to the spot and tries hard not to feel that this grace is just undeserved luck. In a _tekke_ in Aleppo, a younger part of him, unblurred now of enchantment and spirits, revolves slowly, with the love of his life in his arms, and asks: _I don't really need anyone else, do I?_

It doesn't always happen. But Malta is changing, even for him. He paves its roads and measures its battlements, and bows his head before its altar. Some day, from here, he will start out towards the rest of his life. He wishes he could tell Francis.

 

::::

**Author's Note:**

> +The title is lifted from the last line of _Checkmate_ – "We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament."  
> +The quote at the beginning of the fic is from _Pawn In Frankincense_.   
> \+ " God will wipe the tears from all faces" paraphrases Isaiah 25:8 – "He will swallow up death for ever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the reproach of His people will He take away from off all the earth; for the Lord hath spoken it."


End file.
